Category: "Community Engagement" (39 posts)

Mandy Flores-Witte is Senior Communications Officer for the Kenneth Rainin Foundation. This post is part of the Glasspockets’ #OpenForGood series done in partnership with the Fund for Shared Insight. The series explores new tools, promising practices, and inspiring examples showing how some foundations are opening up the knowledge that they are learning for the benefit of the larger philanthropic sector. Contribute your comments on each post and share the series using #OpenForGood. View more posts in the series.

Foundations are uniquely poised to support higher-risk projects, and as a result, failures can happen. Recently, I was searching online for examples on how to share the story about a grant that had some unexpected outcomes and found that, while the field strives to be transparent, it can still be a challenge to learn about initiatives that didn’t go as planned.

Communicating about a project doesn’t always have to happen in a scholarly report or detailed analysis, or by hiring experts to produce an evaluation. Sharing what you learned can be as simple as telling a story.

Embracing the Facts and Checking Our Ego

"Sharing stories can help you reach people in a way that statistics cannot."

When the Rainin Foundation funded our first public art installation in San Francisco’s Central Market, a busy neighborhood undergoing a significant economic transformation, we knew it was an experiment with risks. The art installation’s large platform, swing, and see saw were designed to get neighborhood residents, tech workers, customers of local businesses, and visitors — people spanning the economic spectrum—to interact. There’s no doubt that the project succeeded at bringing people together. But after seven months, it was relocated to a different part of the city because of complaints and safety concerns about the types of people and activities it attracted.

These issues were addressed at several community meetings—meetings that helped build stronger relationships among project stakeholders such as city departments, businesses, artists, local nonprofits, and neighbors. We were disappointed that the project did not go as planned, but we were amazed to see how one public art installation could spark so many conversations and also be a platform for exposing the city’s social issues. We knew we had to share what we learned. Or put another way, we saw an opportunity to be #OpenForGood.

Selecting a Medium for Sharing

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation hosts "Block by Block," a public music and dancing event. Credit: Darryl Smith, Luggage Store Gallery

We considered a formal assessment to communicate our findings, but the format didn’t feel right. We wanted to preserve the stories and the voices of the people involved — whether it was the job fair hosted by a nearby business to help drug dealers get out of the "game," the woman who sought refuge at the installation from domestic violence, or the nonprofit that hosted performances at the site. These stories demonstrated the value of public art.

We decided the most engaging approach would be to have our partners talk candidly about the experience. We selected Medium, an online storytelling platform, to host the series of "as told to" narratives, which we believed would be the most authentic way to hear from our partners. Our intention was to use the series as a tool to start a conversation. And it worked.

Taking Risks is Uncomfortable

The Rainin Foundation intentionally supported art in the public realm — knowing the risks involved — and we thought the discussion of what happened should be public, too. It was uncomfortable to share our missteps publicly, and it made us and our partners vulnerable. In fact, just weeks before publishing the stories, we were cautioned by a trusted colleague about going forward with the piece. The colleague expressed concern it could stir up negative feelings and backfire, harming the reputation of the foundation and our partners.

We took this advice to heart, and we also considered who we are as a foundation. We support cutting-edge ideas to accelerate change. This requires us to test new approaches, challenge the status quo, and be open to failure in both our grantmaking and communications. Taking risks is part of who we are, so we published the series.

We’ve applied a transparent approach to knowledge-sharing in other ways as well. To accompany one of our annual reports, the foundation created a video with Jen Rainin, our chief executive officer, talking about the foundation’s pivotal moments. Jen read some heartfelt personal letters from the parents of children suffering from Inflammatory Bowel Disease, explaining how their children were benefitting from a diet created by a researcher we support. Talking about scientific research can be challenging and complex, but sharing the letters in this way and capturing Jen’s reaction to them enabled us to humanize our work. The video was widely viewed (it got more hits than the written report), and has inspired us to continue experimenting with how we share our work.

Start Talking About Impact

I encourage foundations to look beyond formal evaluations and data for creative ways to be #OpenForGood and talk about their impact. While reports are important to growth and development, sharing stories can help you reach people in a way that statistics cannot. Explore new channels, platforms and content formats. Keep in mind that videos don’t have to be Oscar-worthy productions, and content doesn’t have to be polished to perfection. There’s something to be gained by encouraging those involved in your funded projects to speak directly and honestly. It creates intimacy and fosters human connections. And it’s hard to elicit those kinds of feelings with newsletters or reports.

What are your stories from the times you’ve tried, failed, and learned?

Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen is a Lecturer in Business Strategy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Founder and President of the Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen Foundation, Founder and Board Chairman of Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund. This post is part of the Glasspockets’ #OpenForGood series done in partnership with the Fund for Shared Insight. The series explores new tools, promising practices, and inspiring examples showing how some foundations are opening up the knowledge that they are learning for the benefit of the larger philanthropic sector. Contribute your comments on each post and share the series using #OpenForGood. View more posts in the series.

Nathalie Morton, a resident of Katy, TX, was passionate about giving back to her suburban Houston community. However, she felt her lack of philanthropic experience might hinder her effectiveness.

After initial conversations with her friends and neighbors, she discovered that they shared her desire to give locally and, like herself, lacked the financial ability to make the large contributions that they associated with high-impact philanthropy. After initial online research, Nathalie learned that a giving circle is a collaborative form of giving that allows individuals to pool their resources, knowledge and ideas to develop their philanthropic strategy and scale their impact. Nathalie then discovered the Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen Foundation’s (LAAF.org) Giving Circles Fund (GCF) initiative, an innovative online platform that provides an accessible and empowering experience for a diverse group of philanthropists to practice, grow and scale their philanthropy by giving collaboratively.

“Philanthropists have an imperative to share the research and rationale behind their philanthropic decisions for the greater good.”

With LAAF support, Nathalie was inspired to create the Cinco Ranch Giving Circle to pool her community members’ resources for the greater good. In its first year, this circle of over 30 families has come together to invest thousands of dollars in local nonprofits — all through donations as modest as $10 per month. Every member found that sharing time, values, wisdom and dollars not only deepened their relationships with one another but also that the measurable impact they could have together far exceeded that which they could achieve alone. This experience empowered Nathalie and her fellow giving circle participants to see themselves as philanthropists and develop their practice in a collaborative environment.

Nathalie’s story is just one of myriad ways that the giving circles model has made strategic philanthropy more accessible. Two years ago, I wrote a post on this same blog about how funders should have not only glass pockets but also “glass skulls,” underscoring that philanthropists have an imperative to share the research and rationale behind their philanthropic decisions for the greater good of all who are connected to the issue. Or put another way, giving circles can help donors of all sizes become #OpenForGood. GCF allows philanthropists, like Nathalie, to do just that — by empowering givers at any level to make their thinking and decisions about social impact more open and collaborative.

A lack of financial, intellectual and evaluation resources are barriers to entry for many people who want to give in a way that matters more. That’s why I’ve committed the past two decades to not only redefining philanthropy — I believe that anyone, regardless of age, background or experience, can be a strategic philanthropist — but also to providing highest quality, free educational resources (MOOCs, teaching materials, case studies, giving guides) to empower anyone to make the most of whatever it is they have to give. Although most GCF individual monthly contributions are in the double digits, the impact of our giving circles is increasingly significant — our circles have given over $550,000 in general operating support grants to nonprofits nationally. By design, giving circles amplify individual giving by providing built-in mechanisms for more strategic philanthropy, including increasing

Transparency: Giving circles are effective because they are radically transparent about their operations, selection processes, meeting etiquette, voting rules, etc. We have found that giving circles grow and flourish when members understand exactly how the circle works and their role in its success. In addition, all of our circles publish their grants on their GCF pages, so that current and prospective members have insight into each circle’s history, portfolio and impact.

Democracy: GCF giving circles have a flat structure, in which everyone has an equal vote — regardless of their respective donations’ size. With LAAF support and a comprehensive portfolio of resources, group leaders facilitate meetings — ranging from casual meetups to knowledge sharing and issue ecosystem mapping gatherings to nonprofit nomination and voting sessions. Even in multigenerational giving circles where members are able to give at different levels, all of their members’ voices, perspectives and opinions hold equal weight.

Accessibility: Giving circles require a lower level of financial capital than other philanthropic models. A 2014 study has shown a higher rate of participation in giving circles for Millennials, women and communities of color — reflecting the spectacular pluralism that makes philanthropy beautiful. [1] On our GCF platform, we host multiple college and high school circles that have started teaching their members to carve out philanthropic dollars even on a minimal budget. Additionally, most of our circles are open to the public, and anyone can join and actively participate (yes, that includes you!).

Risk-tolerance: With more diverse participants and lower amounts of capital, GCF giving circles are more likely to give to community-based or smaller organizations that typically struggle to secure capital from more established philanthropies, thus meeting a critical social capital market need.

The power of collectively-pooling ideas, experiences and resources, as well as sharing decision-making, inspired me to found Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund (SV2) in 1998. What began as a small, local giving circle has grown into the second largest venture philanthropy partnership in the world. More importantly, its experiential education model — grounded in the principles listed above — has influenced the philanthropic practice of hundreds of now highly strategic philanthropists who respectively have invested hundreds of millions of dollars globally. To this day, being a partner-member of the SV2 giving circle continues to inform how I give and evolve my own philanthropic impact. Now, powered by the GCF platform, technology gives all of us the ability to scale our own giving by partnering with like-minded givers locally, nationally and globally so we can all move toward an #OpenForGood ideal. The mobilization of givers of all levels harnesses the power of the collective and demonstrates that the sum of even the smallest contributions can lead to deeply meaningful social change.

(Richard Russell currently serves as Board President of The Russell Family Foundation. He is the eldest son of George and Jane Russell. Richard is a Seattle-based communications facilitator, media producer, fine artist and musician. Richard Woo is the Chief Executive Officer of The Russell Family Foundation. He guides the Foundation's strategic planning, programs and community affairs. This post was first published in the National Center for Family Philanthropy's blog.)

At The Russell Family Foundation, we appreciate tools that help make the invisible more visible. This pursuit of transparency is a family trait that stems from our experience in the financial services industry, where we invented stock indexes that more truly reflect the market. The Frank Russell Company earned a reputation for quality research, long-term thinking and general excellence. We do our best to carry on in that tradition at the foundation.

In particular, we seek to communicate and practice our core values, such as lifelong learning and the importance of relationships. During the past 20 years, these touchstones have served us well.

Today, we’re relying on them even more as we prepare for a period of significant transition, which involves new roles for family members, changes to leadership and staff positions, and evolving our core programs. What’s different now, however, is that we are employing new tools to guide us.

Legacy Communications Toolkit

For us, transparency is as much about discovery as disclosure. That’s because the discovery process is how we determine: (1) what we know, (2) what we don’t know, (3) where we stand, and (4) what boundaries, if any, exist for a specific topic. Discovery can be a humbling and inspiring experience. Sometimes it exposes our blind spots; other times it reveals important new opportunities. Nevertheless, learning is the payoff for investing in transparency and discovery.

In 2016, we took steps to re-affirm our founding principles, in order to set the stage for the next 20 years of operations. We identified the need for additional frameworks to help guide us through important issues such as leadership succession and grant strategy. From those efforts, we’ve bundled together all the useful pieces, which we call our Legacy Communications Toolkit (it's a work in progress).

Over the past couple of years, we have developed some new components. One centerpiece is our three-dimensional chessboard, which we introduced in our last blog post. It is a useful tool for initiating and clarifying conversation about important issues that might otherwise be difficult to surface. The chessboard can be used to visualize and understand the complex layers of communications and expectations associated with foundation life – like how transparent we need to be when revising our grant strategy, or how we understand a family member who doesn’t want to participate.

Case in point: In a family foundation, tensions can arise when trustees hold competing or conflicting opinions and worldviews. If not handled sensitively, principled conversations among peers can become deeply personal, causing individuals to briefly lose sight of the organizational mission and the goal of serving the public trust. One such discussion arose among our trustees in 2016; at issue was the scope of themes that should be eligible for funding. The intentional and purposeful conversation among family trustees about this matter was facilitated by a skilled and trusted organizational consultant outside the foundation. With that assistance, the trustees clarified the boundaries between personal, familial, organizational and public goals – and eventually settled on a decision that balanced the greatest number of interests especially that of serving the foundation’s public mission. This exercise in more transparent communication among trustees and consensus decision-making was essentially the laboratory that gave rise to the three-dimensional chessboard.

Another dynamic tool we rely on is a graphic timeline of the foundation’s history. It is a 20-foot mural, on display in our office that highlights important moments from our beginnings in 1999 to the present day. The timeline is filled with photos, charts, and quotations, with more being added as time passes. This visual history does more than remind us of the past; it helps us appreciate the context of defining moments. Those moments (as well as the details of our history) constitute our collective narrative. We are continually exploring and discovering the appropriate balance between transparency, family privacy and a public trust.

The Russell Family Foundation uses its timeline as a teaching tool. Source: The Russell Family Foundation

To date, the timeline has proven to be an invaluable teaching tool, especially for younger family members who wish to take active roles in the foundation, or newcomers to our enterprise who want to know how we got here. It stimulates conversation and questions, and it has helped us onboard new community board members and staff by giving them a vivid sense of our history and mission. Grantees and community visitors are often intrigued by the informal imagery captured on the story wall, which invites their curiosity, discussion and ultimately a deeper relationship with our work.

Imagining the Future Together

The elements of our Legacy Communications Toolkit emphasize storytelling in its many forms: visual, narrative, historical, data-driven, and more. Storytelling activates our imaginations so we can see the changes we’ve accomplished or wish to make going forward. This process also helps us envision what level of transparency is required.

A good example of this approach is how we are currently updating one of our longest standing environmental programs, which focuses on the waters of Puget Sound.

After a decade of investment and hundreds of grants employing a wide variety of tactics, we took stock of our impact on Puget Sound protection and restoration. We reviewed our grant history, studied the most recent literature, interviewed regional thought leaders, and drew upon the relationships with our longtime grantees. The effort was illuminating – making the invisible more visible. Despite all that had been accomplished over the years, we recognized that our efforts were a mile wide and an inch deep.

Visualizing our impact in this way gave us the motivation to develop a new approach. We knew from past projects that there was an appetite for alignment among nonprofits. We also realized that our broad network of individual grantees gave us credibility to encourage greater collaboration within the field. We put these pieces together to create the Puget Sound Collective, an informal group of nonprofits and funders who desire a more coordinated regional vision and strategy for Puget Sound recovery.

Our partners joined the Puget Sound Collective for the possibility of making greater impact and doing more together. But, naturally, they want to know where their peers are coming from, how specific goals will be set, and how decisions will be made. In other words, they expect transparency. We knew going in that openness and candor would be the table stakes for this new forum. However, bringing people together to work across differences (organizations, missions, geographies, genders, race, class, etc.) requires transparency in all directions. That takes time; it takes deep, trusting relationships.

The experience has reinforced how important it is for the foundation to practice transparent behavior. We are building the road alongside our partners as we walk it. We need to be honest when we can only see as far down the road as they can. We need to be clear in our intention for grantees to set the agenda – to offer support without control – because relationships like this move at the speed of trust.

At a time when the country is experiencing deep divides and uncertainty, family foundations can reassure their constituents by demonstrating a commitment to transparency about their story and the essentials behind the work they do. However, they should also bear in mind the Goldilocks Principle – “not too hot, not too cold, but just right.” They need to find the best fit for their organization because the benefits of transparency are measured in degrees.

We hope our methods, experiments, and discoveries serve as useful references. Mahalo to those who commented on the first blog post. To everyone reading this installment, please share your thoughts, counterpoints or questions.

Two friends were struggling to pay their rent when they realized they could earn much-needed funds from travelers. In 2007, they charged their first three customers $80 a night to sleep on an air mattress in their San Francisco apartment when local hotels sold out during a conference.

And the rest is history.

Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, friends and former Rhode Island School of Design classmates, expanded their enterprising idea. With Gebbia’s former roommate, Nathan Blecharczyk, the trio founded Airbnb in 2008 and revolutionized the art of renting home space. As Gebbia explained in a TED talk, Airbnb designs for trust to create a “culture of sharing… that brings us community and connection instead of isolation and separation.”

Within 10 years, the trio has groomed Airbnb into a $30 billion tech giant, a disruptive and controversial force that has transformed the travel and tech industry and popularized the idea of the “sharing economy.” As Airbnb has grown, so have controversies and debates over its impact in already tight rental markets. Criticism that the company has contributed to community displacement and a reduction in available long-term rentals have led to ongoing legal battles. Yet, despite the regulatory struggles, even hotels are rallying to find ways to imitate the trendsetting Airbnb.

The Airbnb co-founders are among the youngest to join Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates in the Giving Pledge. It also marked the first time all of a company’s co-founders committed at the same time. Credit: Entrepreneur

Now the entrepreneurial trio – who are each worth an estimated $3.3 billion and among the youngest on the 2016 Forbes 400 billionaires list – have started making visible strides in the original sharing economy by engaging in philanthropy.

The Airbnb co-founders are among the youngest to join Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates in the Giving Pledge, whereby wealthy individuals pledge to give away the majority of their wealth within their lifetime. When they joined the Giving Pledge last year, it also marked the first time all of a company’s co-founders committed at the same time.

In a Fortune interview, the entrepreneurs credit Warren Buffett and Bill Gates with their decision to join the Giving Pledge. Gebbia touted Buffett as a “Jedi master of philanthropy.” And Chesky said Buffett’s argument resonated with him – wealth beyond a certain point has zero utility, and such wealth could have a greater social impact.

Still relatively new to philanthropy, the trio acknowledge they are taking their time to give away their wealth. However, openness is at the heart of the sharing economy, and the Airbnb co-founders understand a public expectation of openness in philanthropy exists.

“I’ve always believed that you should [be public about giving], such that you can be very public about your values and what you stand for,” Chesky said in a Fortune interview.

Corporate Philanthropy

As the Airbnb co-founders design their philanthropic strategy, the company is experimenting with different ways to use its platform for good.

The San Francisco-based company has created a disaster response platform that brings together hosts and community groups to provide free temporary housing for individuals and families displaced by disasters, as well as relief workers. When a disaster occurs, Airbnb contacts local hosts who may volunteer to provide free housing; if no hosts are available, Airbnb will subsidize the housing cost.

“I’ve always believed that you should [be public about giving], such that you can be very public about your values and what you stand for.”

Airbnb connects hosts to help support local and national disaster relief efforts, and arranges disaster preparedness training. Airbnb also contributes travel vouchers to support advance teams and large groups of relief workers for major national and international disasters.

More recently, the company has pledged to use its disaster response platform to aid refugees affected by President Donald Trump’s executive order. Over the next five years, Airbnb has committed to provide short-term housing for 100,000 refugees and those barred from entering the United States. Airbnb also pledged $4 million to the International Rescue Committee over the next four years to support the most critical needs of displaced people worldwide.

Airbnb also recently announced a scheduled launch of a humanitarian division next month focusing on global issues such as displaced populations, rural flight and bias against strangers.

Given that building community is one Airbnb’s central philosophies, the company’s platform supports a number of opportunities for Airbnb hosts to make a positive social impact via global volunteerism and “Open Homes,” which provides housing at free or reduced costs for medical treatments, college visits, or family gatherings.

Through a “social impact experiences” program, Airbnb guests enjoy culture and learn about local causes in the cities they are visiting. Local community leaders and volunteers are invited to create an opportunity that brings people closer to their work. Nonprofit leaders and Airbnb hosts lead the experience, and the nonprofits receive 100% of the social impact experience fees.

Airbnb hopes this will connect guests to issues they care about or introduce them to new causes. The social impact experiences run the gamut, from visiting a local artist or animal shelter to attending a dinner and theater event, or spending a day with an urban gardener to create green space in Los Angeles.

Airbnb has committed to fighting homelessness in New York City, where the company recently settled a lawsuit involving legislation that would fine Airbnb hosts up to $7,500 for renting out certain types of apartments and homes for less than 30 days. Last year, the company donated $100,000 to WIN (formerly Women In Need), a group that helps homeless women and their children. Additionally, Airbnb pledged to recruit volunteer hosts and guests to assist WIN clients with professional skills training, such as resume building and interviewing for jobs, and increasing children’s literacy.

Personal Giving

The trio’s individual giving appears to be driven by a spirit of entrepreneurship; they want to give others the opportunity to achieve their dreams and support “future creatives and entrepreneurs.”

Joe Gebbia

In Joe Gebbia’s Giving Pledge letter, he described his hope to help other entrepreneurs: “I want to enable as many people as possible, especially in underprivileged communities, to experience this magic firsthand… and achieve their dreams.”

The 35-year-old Georgia native added, “I want to devote my resources to bring the moment of instantiation, when someone who has an idea sees it become real, to as many people as I can. It can unlock the understanding that they can make things happen, that they can shape the world around them.”

Gebbia serves on the Board of Trustees at his alma mater, the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). In 2014, he pledged $300,000 to RISD for a $50,000 term scholarship and an endowed fund for talented students in need of financial aid.

Nathan and Elizabeth Blecharczyk

In Nathan and Elizabeth Blecharczyk’s Giving Pledge letter, the couple said they are in a “unique position to have significant positive impact” by giving away their wealth. “We feel a responsibility to share our good fortune, and we pledge to dedicate the majority of our wealth over time to philanthropy,” the Blecharczyks said.

Nathan Blecharczyk, 33, who developed Airbnb’s website, demonstrated his entrepreneurial spirit early on. When he was 12 years old, Blecharczyk learned how to code and wrote customized programs for clients; he developed popular programs for e-mail marketing. By age 14, he founded an Internet software business and funded his Harvard University tuition with the sale of his business.

The San Francisco residents cited their upbringing – his parents taught him to be inquisitive, confident and motivated, and her parents and teachers taught her to be self-aware and use her strengths to help others – as the reason to direct their philanthropy toward the “potential of children” and “transformative ideas.”

“Airbnb went from an off-the-wall idea to a transformative company as a result of assembling the right team – cofounders, mentors, investors, and later employees – and now we want to help others pursue unconventional ideas that can make the world a better place,” the Blecharczyks said in their letter.

The couple said their interests are in the areas of education, scientific research, medicine, space exploration, environment and effective governance. “Our philanthropic approach will be reflected through the lens of our own passions and experiences but rooted in analysis to ensure we are choosing wisely,” the couple said.

Brian Chesky

Brian Chesky, 35, wants his philanthropy to spur youth entrepreneurship. “We all live with unknown potential. The younger you are, the more unknown it is,” Chesky said in his Giving Pledge letter. “But the clock ticks by each day of your life. And each day someone young isn’t exposed to what is possible, their potential slowly dims.”

The New York native credited a high school teacher and RISD professors for helping him to dream and see that he could “design the kind of world I want to live in.”

“You can have a lot of impact on someone just by showing them what is possible,” Chesky said. “With this pledge, I want to help more kids realize the kind of journey I have had. I want to show them that their dreams are not bounded by what they can see in front of them. Their limits are not so limited. Walt Disney once said, ‘If you can dream it, you can do it.’ I would like to help them dream.”

SAVE THE DATE: April 13, 1:30-3:00 p.m. EST. Like this blog series? Attend our Look Inside Innovation Funding event in person or via livestream in San Francisco. More details and registration info coming in March.

(Cedric Brown has been a leader in philanthropy and the civil society sector for nearly two decades. He is currently the Chief of Community Engagement at the Kapor Center for Social Impact, in Oakland, California. The Kapor Center won the 2017 Crunchies Social Impact Award.)

This post is part of the Funding Innovation series, produced by Foundation Center's Glasspockets and GrantCraft, and underwritten by the Vodafone Americas Foundation. The series explores funding practices and trends at the intersection of problem-solving, technology, and design. Please contribute your comments on each post and share the series using #fundinginnovation. View more posts in the series.

Frankly, I get tired of talking about innovation. Sometimes discussions about innovation come across as Sisyphean pursuits, where style is greater than substance, and preening is greater than practice. I’m looking for conversations about innovation with soul. With gravitas. With a conscience. Ones that advance uplifting solutions that make this Earth more habitable or help more people meet their hierarchy of needs (or as of late, that strengthen the fast-unraveling social contract necessary for humankind to co-exist).

Three years ago at the behest of our benefactors, the then-Kapor Foundation began to explore how to move away from our traditional responsive grantmaking. The benefactors had begun to invest in seed-staged tech startups that aim to address and mitigate equality gaps. They witnessed the power of designing solutions for markets - "communities" - that operate at scale. They saw how different and disruptive ways of approaching problem solving can create a culture shift. They came to us, the foundation staff, and requested that we start thinking about this intersection of tech-for-good and our grantmaking work.

“Are we overlooking the resourcefulness that resides in the 'hood, favela, sticks, and bush?”

In the ensuing years, we experimented with different approaches, borrowing from our new knowledge of Lean Startup principles. Through a clunky, iterative learning process - which in hindsight I would like to label as our R&D - we decided to lead the way by doing our part to expand access to the tech sector and innovation economy.

Van Jones has shared that his dear friend Prince said we need to create a "Black Zuckerberg." While I take issue with that particular mold (pattern recognition and Ivy league degree-as-entry-barrier are part of tech's diversity problem), I get The Purple One's point, echoed by Mitch Kapor: "Genius is evenly distributed across zip codes, but opportunity is not." Working with a variety of partners in this ecosystem, we seek to plug leaks in the tech talent pipeline while sharpening the skills and talents that reside in all of our diverse communities.

To this point, I’ve judged a number of youth hackathons and design sessions, mostly attended by low-income, “low opportunity,” or similarly-labeled young people. These youth are participating in these activities as an initial exposure to tech skill-building and careers, and I am consistently impressed by how these young teams create apps that address information and resource gaps: student loan payment platforms; mentoring matching; anonymous bully identification; and safe passage routing among them.

Our premise is that as the high-tech industry becomes more inclusive, companies and teams will become better at problem solving, will create better products and solutions that serve a wider market, and will utilize tech-driven platforms to solve pressing problems that are informed by their lived experiences. Our backup? Heavy hitters like McKinsey, Catalyst, Kellogg and Stanford have found this to be true.

How are we benefiting from the terrific brainpower, scrappiness, and necessity - as the mother of invention - that resides in nonprofit leaders, in low-income communities, with people who are "making a way out of no way" as my church folks used to say? Are we overlooking the resourcefulness that resides in the 'hood, favela, sticks, bush?

You've heard these questions before, I'm sure. So what are we doing about it?

We're catalyzing and strengthening tech innovation, in line with the theme of this blog, by introducing and preparing more people to lead its creation. Tech shouldn't be an insular economy; now more than ever, we need thinkers, tinkerers, designers, and dreamers who are motivated by the pursuit of a significantly positive impact rather than a sinfully profitable buyout.

In 2017, the Kapor Center - including our sibling organizations, Kapor Capital and Level Playing Field Institute - are committed to increasing diverse tech entrepreneurship, access to capital, access to tech and STEM education, and building strong community institutions to promote a more diverse tech ecosystem in the Bay Area, with a special focus on Oakland, our home.

We’re employing a range of old tools for new outcomes - convening key partners to coordinate around systems-level goals (kind of collective impact-ish), providing financial support to select roundtables to support this coordination work, and utilizing the visibility of our benefactors and brand to raise awareness about the issues at hand and to channel resources to efforts aligned with our work, helping to create a larger, stronger network of collaborators. And we’re using our brand-spankin’ new building on Oakland’s Broadway corridor to host events that welcome, validate, leverage, and enrich diverse talent - namely people of color and women - as they pursue their entrepreneurship, technical, and impact goals. We see this work as a powerful overlay between the ubiquity of tech, the possibility of entrepreneurship, the integrity of fairness, and the necessity of economic mobility and empowerment for a just society.

But back to the issue at hand - innovation. I think that soulful, meaningful, conscientious innovation is rooted in a nagging question: “What can we do to be more effective?” It’s organic; a quest to find the bull’s eye of effectiveness en route to real impact. It requires experimentation, evolution, and even a bit of envy - as a competitive motivator to be top of class, of course. And while so many of these variables are present in innovation economy practitioners, I’d like to see them more firmly rooted in addressing real world issues informed by and for real people.

(Mandy Ellerton and Molly Matheson Gruen joined the [Archibald] Bush Foundation in 2011, where they created and now direct the Foundation's Community Innovation programs. The programs allow communities to develop and test new solutions to community challenges, using approaches that are collaborative and inclusive of people who are most directly affected by the problem.)

This post is part of the Funding Innovation series, produced by Foundation Center's Glasspockets and GrantCraft, and underwritten by the Vodafone Americas Foundation. The series explores funding practices and trends at the intersection of problem-solving, technology, and design. Please contribute your comments on each post and share the series using #fundinginnovation. View more posts in the series.

Mandy Ellerton

Molly Matheson Gruen

Good ideas for solving our toughest social problems come from a variety of places. But, we need more than just good ideas  we need transparent and thoughtful ways to get community buy-in and a wide variety of perspectives to make those ideas a reality.

For a cautionary case in point, take the origin story (later chronicled in the book The Prize) of the ill-fated attempt to transform the failing Newark public schools. A prominent governor, mayor and, later, an ultra-wealthy tech mogul, hatched the idea to radically transform the schools in the back of a chauffeured S.U.V. Commentary suggests that these leaders did not consult community stakeholders about the plan, only half-heartedly seeking community input much later in the process. As one community member put it to these leaders, "You have forced your plans on the Newark community, without the

measure of stakeholder input that anyone, lay or professional, would consider adequate or respectful." To some observers, it's no surprise that without initial community buy-in, nor a transparent process and over $100 million later, the plan ultimately crashed and burned.

But, let's not throw stones at glass houses. The Newark example is indicative of a larger pattern especially familiar to those of us in the field of philanthropy. We've learned that lesson the hard way, too. Many of us have been involved in (well-intentioned) backroom and ivory tower deals with prominent community leaders to magically fix community problems with some "good ideas." Sometimes, those ideas work. But a lot of times, they don't. And unfortunately, we often chalk these failures up to innovation simply being a risky endeavor, comparing our social innovation failure rates to the oft-discussed (maybe even enshrined?) business or entrepreneurship failure rates. What's more, we almost never actively, sincerely discuss and learn from these failed endeavors.

But social innovation failure often comes at a cost, leaving behind disillusioned community members, bad outcomes for some of our most vulnerable, and lots and lots of wasted dollars that could have gone to something better. Take the Newark example: the failed attempt to transform the schools created massive civic disruption, re-awakened historic hurts and injustice and will likely leave community members even more skeptical of any future efforts to improve the schools.

Through our work at the Bush Foundation, we've learned that truly good ideasthose that will really have a sustainable impactare often created in deep partnership and trust between organizations, leaders, andmost criticallythe people most affected by a problem.

But, that kind of deep community partnership and transparency takes a lot of work, time, and attention. And, most everything that takes a lot of work takes some funding.

That's why we created our Community Innovation programs at the Bush Foundation in 2013: to fund and reward the process of innovationthe process of solving problems. While the emphasis in innovation funding is often on "early stage" organizations or projects, we joke that we are a "pre-early" funder or that we fund "civic R & D." We provide funding for organizations to figure out what problem to address in the first place, to get a better understanding of the problem, to generate ideas to solve the problem, and then, after all that work (and maybe having to revisit some of the earlier stages along the way), the organization might be ready to test or implement a good idea. See how we depict that "pre-early" problem solving process here.

Most importantly, throughout the innovation or problem-solving process, we also look for particular values to drive the organization's approach: Is the organization genuinely and deeply engaging the people most affected by the problem? Is the organization working in deep partnership with other organizations and leaders? Is the organization making the most of existing resources?

Let's bring it to life. Here are three examples of the 150+ organizations we've funded to engage in a process to solve problems in their communities:

World Wildlife Fund's Northern Great Plains initiative is bringing ranchers, conservationists, oil business developers, and government officials together to create a vision for the future of North Dakota's badlands and a shared energy development plan that protects this important landscape.

PACT for Families Collaborative engaged truant youth, their parents, education staff, and service providers to understand barriers to school attendance and redesign services and test strategies for positive, sustainable solutions to truancy in western Minnesota.

Pillsbury United Communities is using human-centered design processes to engage North Minneapolis residents to address their neighborhood's food desert and create North Market: a new grocery store managed in partnership with a local health clinic that will also be a clinic, pharmacy, and wellness education center.

"We've learned that truly good ideasthose that will really have a sustainable impactare often created in deep partnership and trust between organizations, leaders, and...the people most affected by a problem."

Our grantees and partners are teaching us a lot about what it takes for communities to solve problems. One of the biggest things we've learned is that collaborative projects often take far more time than anyone initially expects, for a variety of reasons. Over the past few years nearly a third of our grantees have requested more time to complete their grants, which we have readily agreed to.

For example, the Northfield Promise Initiative is a highly-collaborative, cross-sector, community-wide effort to address education disparities in Northfield, Minnesota. The initiative utilizes action teams composed of diverse stakeholders to drive its work. Early on in the project they decided to stagger the rollout of the teams rather than launch them all at once. That allowed them to take more care in composing and launching each team and allowed interested stakeholders to engage in multiple teams. In addition, later teams could learn from the successes and challenges of the earlier ones. As the grantee put it, "Partners felt strongly that it is important to give the process this extra time to ensure that all the different community voices and insights have been included (thereby maintaining this as a community-owned initiative)." We gladly extended their grant term from two years to four years so that they could spend the time they believed necessary to lead the problem-solving effort thoughtfully and inclusively.

For more helpful examples, here are a couple of resources to explore:

One of our innovation programs is an award for organizations that have a track record of solving problems with their communities, called the Bush Prize for Community Innovation. Together with our evaluation partner Wilder Research, we created a report about some of our Bush Prize winners that digs into specific conditions, methods and techniques that appear to help organizations innovate.

We believe storytelling and transparency inspire innovation. Our grantees openly share what they're learning as they pursue solutions to community problems in grantee learning logs. The learning logs also include references to specific techniques and methods the organizations use to pursue innovation.

As funders, we also have a role in the innovation process that goes beyond writing the check. By virtue of our relationships and portfolios, we have a bird's eye view of the field. By opening up what we are learning, we hope to build trust with our stakeholders and help others build on our work, hopefully leading to more and better future innovations.

Over six million Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 are not in school or working. Often known as disconnected or opportunity youth, they are among the upwards of fourteen million young adults who are only marginally or periodically in school or working. At the same time, several million young people have had almost no labor market or educational experience in the past year.

Youth and young adults represent the future of our country — our economy, our communities, our democracy — and it is in our best interest to help ensure that they’re engaged with and connected to school and jobs.

To that end, the Annie E. Casey Foundation asked Foundation Center to create a special collection on IssueLab about the group of young people known as disconnected youth. This new online resource houses nearly one hundred and forty recent reports, case studies, fact sheets, and evaluations focused on the challenges confronting youth today, as well as lessons and insights from the field.

Casey acted on this expanded commitment to opportunity youth by launching two new initiatives — Generation Work and Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential — and by strengthening our longstanding Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative. All three focus on enabling more youth and young adults to succeed in school, secure good jobs and a steady paycheck, and become financially stable. More recently, we have invested in increasing access to summer learning and employment opportunities for young people in our hometown of Baltimore, as well as in research and evaluation aimed at identifying the most effective programs and strategies. In addition, we've supported the youth-focused efforts of our national policy and civic partners.

What has become clear over the past five years is that advocates for opportunity youth need to build on existing evidence, program models, and policies, even as we wrestle with new questions related to young people with firsthand experience of the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, not to mention trauma; young parents; the role of social and family ties in the lives of disconnected youth; youth leadership; and the dramatically different outcomes we see among youth by race and ethnicity.

In this spirit of gathering lessons and asking new questions, we hope this collection on IssueLab will help promote the dissemination of promising practices in the field of opportunity youth and, eventually, grow to include more technical evaluation studies that build our overall evidence base.

Youth are our future. And we in the philanthropic, public, private, and nonprofit sectors must help them realize their aspirations by building multiple, effective pathways that enable them to succeed in school and in the labor market.

Butthis will only happen if we share and synthesize our knowledge in real time to create better investment strategies and choices.

Given its overall interest in building capacity and strengthening the field, philanthropy is well positioned to gather practice and research literature about programs and policies that support opportunity youth. Doing so will help ensure that nonprofits and other stakeholders have access to accurate, up-to-date information about what works for whom and what targets should guide future investment — while paving the way for the application of that knowledge on a broader scale benefiting many more young people.

The Casey Foundation is committed to continuing its youth initiatives and sharing lessons about promising strategies that promote tangible results and progress. We invite others to join us in this endeavor and look forward to contributions from our peers and partners in this work.

To spur change at the systems level, it is critical to involve many individuals and institutions that work within that system, facilitating the sharing of information and knowledge. This has been a core belief of McKnight’s Collaborative Crop Research Program (CCRP) for many years. Our assessment, however, is that cross-sector collaboration, learning, and networking have historically been sorely lacking in agriculture research and development systems across the world.

Testing a New Model

Twelve years ago, CCRP sought to change this by testing out a community of practice (CoP) model in the Andes region of South America. Community of practice, a term that has come into fashion over the last few years, refers to a group of people with a common concern or passion who interact regularly to improve their work. In the case of CCRP, the cohort of Andes grantees was united by geographic region and common interest and experience in addressing the stark hunger and poverty issues in their communities. As the model began to prove effective in strengthening capacity at regional, institutional, project, and individual levels, CCRP expanded the model to our other regions.

Today, all four CCRP regions exchange ideas within their communities of practice and with each other, working to spark new thinking and innovation in agriculture research and development. Over time, the communities have grown their skills and approaches, particularly around farmer-centered research and agroecological intensification (AEI) — or, finding food solutions that balance the needs of the earth and its people.

Kandela, the president of a women’s group belonging to the farmer federation FUMA Gaskiya (Niger) is marking her preferred pearl millet panicles during participatory pearl millet selection. (Photo credit: Bettina Haussmann).

Ways to Improve Networking, Learning, and Collaboration

With the success of The McKnight Foundation's four implemented communities of practices, the foundation has identified several methods that help to achieve success in networking, learning, and collective action. First, each community of practice is supported by a regional team that supports CCRP’s grantmaking processes; the team also facilitates ongoing support and feedback loops. These include reviewing concept notes and proposals, planning inception meetings, cross-project meetings and exchanges, initiating mid-year reviews, and providing feedback on annual reports and project progress. It is a resource-intensive model, to be sure. But the foundation hears consistently from grantees that this structure of regular interactions builds skills and relationships with project teams and other partners, serving to strengthen the capacity of the larger CoP.

Another important way that CCRP builds an effective community of practice is by tailoring its priorities and activities based on each region’s context. A combination of efforts help promote a CoP’s vibrancy within the crop program, including:

A grantmaking portfolio driven by regional needs and opportunities

In-person and virtual trainings and workshops to explore particular thematic areas, strengthen research methods, and build particular sets of skills

Targeted technical assistance based on emergent needs, both grantee-led and initiated by the regional team, as well as linking with program-wide technical expertise and support

Cultivating an evaluative culture that supports 1) integrated monitoring, evaluation, and planning; 2) learning regarding developmental-evaluation and adaptive action approaches; 3) using and incorporating foundational principles that guide the work and program as a whole; and 4) building participatory evaluation skills

Other resources and tools such as handbooks, guides, videos, checklists and templates, sensors, database access, and GIS technology provision

Ongoing formal and informal peer learning

Support and collaboration in the CoP for leadership development, mentorships, conference planning, peer review for publications, and other kinds of professional and academic development

The foundation's crop research program first implemented the community of practice model in the Andes 12 years ago and in Africa 10 years ago. Today, these seasoned CoPs continue to lead to new innovations and inspiration. The foundation is excited and proud to celebrate the 10th anniversaries of both the Southern Africa and West Africa communities of practices this year. On the occasion of these anniversaries, each CoP recently produced collections of research and insights gathered from their respective areas of work. We invite you to review them and learn more.

There are a lot of interesting data in the recent Benchmarking Foundation Evaluation Practices report, co-authored by the Center for Effective Philanthropy and the Center for Evaluation Innovation. There is useful, practical information on how foundations structure their evaluation operations, how much they spend on evaluation, the kinds of evaluations they commission, and so forth. Great stuff.

But some findings give me pause. Perhaps the most sobering statistic in the report is that very few foundations consistently share their evaluations with their grantees, other foundations, or the public. Only 28 percent share their evaluations “quite a bit or a lot” with their grantees. And that drops to 17 percent for sharing with other foundations, and only 14 percent for sharing with the general public.

“We have a moral imperative to share what we are learning from the evaluations we commission so that others may learn from our successes and mistakes.”

Really? Why are we not sharing the lessons from the evaluations we commission?

It feels wrong.

It seems to me that we have a moral imperative to share what we are learning from the evaluations we commission so that others may learn — both from our successes and mistakes.

After all, why would we not share?

Are we worried about our stock price falling? No. We don’t have a stock price.

Are we worried about causing undue harm to specific organizations? There are ways to share key lessons from evaluations without naming specific organizations.

Do we believe that others don’t care about our evaluations or our findings? Time and again, foundation leaders list assessment and evaluation as high on the list of things they need to get better at.

Are reports too technical? That can be a challenge, but again, there are ways to share an executive summary — or commission an easy to read summary — that is not a heavy, overly technical report.

So, the main question is, why commission an evaluation if you are going to keep the lessons all to yourself? Is that charitable?

I often get asked which foundations are the most transparent, closely followed by the more skeptical line of questioning about whether the field of philanthropy is actually becoming more transparent, or just talking more about it. When Glasspockets launched six years ago, a little less than 7 percent of foundations had a web presence; today that has grown to a still underwhelming 10 percent. So, the reality is that transparency remains a challenge for the majority of foundations, but some are making it a priority to open up their work.

Our new Foundation Transparency Challenge infographic is designed to help foundations tackle the transparency challenge. It provides an at-a-glance overview of how and why foundations are prioritizing transparency, inventories common strengths and pain points across the field, and highlights good examples that can serve as inspiration for others in areas that represent particular challenges to the field.

Using data gathered from the 81 foundations that have taken and shared the “Who Has Glass Pockets?” transparency assessment, we identified transparency trends and then displayed these trends by the benefits to philanthropy, demonstrating the field's strengths and weaknesses when it comes to working more openly.

Transparency Comfort Zone

Despite the uniqueness of each philanthropic institution, looking at the data this way does seem to reveal that the majority of foundations consider a few elements as natural starting points in their journey to transparency. As we look across the infographic, this foundation transparency comfort zone could be identified by those elements that are shared by almost all participating foundations:

Contact Information

Mission Statement

Grantmaking Priorities

Grantmaking Process

Key Staff List

Transparency Pain Points

On the flip side, the infographic also reveals the toughest transparency challenges for philanthropy, those elements that are shared by the fewest participating funders:

Assessments of Overall Foundation Performance

Diversity Data

Executive Compensation Process

Grantee Feedback

Open Licensing Policies

Strategic Plans

What’s In It for Me?

Once we start talking about the pain points, we often get questions about why foundations should share certain elements, so the infographic identifies the primary benefit for each transparency element. Some elements could fit in multiple categories, but for each element, we tried to identify the primary benefit as a way to assess where there is currently the most attention, and where there is room for improvement. When viewed this way, there are areas of great strength or at least balance between strengths and weaknesses in participating foundations when it comes to opening up elements that build credibility and public trust, and those that serve to strengthen grantee relationship-building. And the infographic also illustrates that philanthropic transparency is at its weakest when it comes to opening up its knowledge to build a community of shared learning. For a field like philanthropy that is built not just on good deeds but on the experimentation of good ideas, prioritizing knowledge sharing may well be the area in which philanthropy has the most to gain by improving openness.

“The reality is that transparency remains a challenge of foundations, but some are making it a priority to open up their work.”

And speaking of shared learning, there is much to be learned from the foundation examples that exist by virtue of participating in the “Who Has Glass Pockets?” assessment process. Our transparency team often receives requests for good examples of how other foundations are sharing information regarding diversity, codes of conduct, or knowledge sharing just to name a few, so based on the most frequently requested samples, the infographic links to actual foundation web pages that can serve as a model to others.

Why did we pick these particular examples, you might ask? Watch this space for a follow-up blog that dives into what makes these good examples in each category.

#GlasspocketsChallenge

And more importantly, do you have good examples to share from your foundation’s transparency efforts? Add your content to our growing Glasspockets community by completing our transparency self-assessment form or by sharing your ideas with us on Twitter @glasspockets with #GlasspocketsChallenge and you might be among those featured next time!

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About Transparency Talk

Transparency Talk, the Glasspockets blog, is a platform for candid and constructive conversation about foundation transparency and accountability. In this space, Foundation Center highlights strategies, findings, and best practices on the web and in foundations–illuminating the importance of having "glass pockets."

The views expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation Center.